"Hello, we announce that the speaking clock of Orange is definitively closed".

Here is the sentence that we hear when dialing 3699 since this Friday.

The service which gave the French legal time on the telephone, created in 1933 by the astronomer Ernest Esclangon, therefore died out as the operator had announced last May.

“It is still a service that has been in operation for almost 90 years, it is part of the national heritage”, confided Michel Abgrall, engineer in charge of monitoring the famous mechanism.

Victim of the digital age

Fourth generation model, the latest version of the "Talking Clock" was based on the "coordinated universal time" of the Paris Observatory.

It broadcast the time with an hourly precision of the order of ten milliseconds.

The service was billed at 1.50 euros plus the price of a call for its last hours of existence.

Its shutdown is the consequence of the “scheduled end of life” of the equipment essential to its operation and above all of “the regular and significant drop” in the number of calls to 3699, explains Charlotte Vanpeen, 43, in charge of media relations.

The digital age has therefore got the better of this almost century-old service.

"The digitization of equipment, the multiplication of sources that can give the time, mobiles, computers, tablets, inevitably participate in this erosion", indicates Orange in a press release.

So you will never have to wait for the 4th top again to know the time.

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